Submission for Round 13 of the Quidditch League

Seeker for the Chudley Cannons

Prompt: Beyond the Sea by Bobby Darin

Word Count: 2949

Draco stared out his window and sighed, hands playing absently in his long hair. He was bored, again. Not that it was anything new; he was bored all the time. That's just what happened when one lived in an isolated room atop a very tall tower in the middle of the Forbidden Forest all by oneself, he supposed.

Well, alright, Draco supposed he wasn't totally alone. He did have his pet snake for company, but Ophis could leave the tower anytime he wished to go hunt for food, slithering up and down the tower walls as he pleased. And Ophis couldn't talk to him, so he hardly counted.

If there was one thing Draco wanted, it was to someday get out of his tower and finally see what was beyond it. He knew there was a big, big world out there, full of wonderful sights to see and people to meet. He'd read all about castles and towns and deserts and prairies and oceans – he wanted to go anywhere and everywhere.

Draco wanted to go see anything beyond his tower so badly that he'd actually obliquely mentioned it to his mother once. He hadn't even said he wanted to leave, just that he thought the beach sounded nice, but she'd exploded anyway. It had turned into an hour-long rant about how she needed to know he was safe in his tower where nobody could hurt him and had ended with Draco sobbing and promising that he never wanted to leave her.

The truth was that Draco didn't really want to leave his mother, but sometimes… he just felt a little stifled. Which was ridiculous, of course, because she only came and visited him once a week, and the rest of the time he had the tower to himself.

Draco sighed again, a bit more dramatically this time, because he was bored – and then something moving in the trees below caught his eye and he jolted upright.

It was a stranger on… a hippogriff? Draco gaped in amazement, in part due to the stranger's interesting choice of mount, and also because he'd never seen anyone else here. Draco wondered how this person had even gotten inside the wards, because his mother had described in vivid detail what would happen to anyone who tried to get in and harm him.

But, Draco reasoned, if a person had managed to get inside the wards, wouldn't that mean that they didn't mean to harm him? Maybe… they would be his friend? He was quite satisfied with this reasoning and leaned forward out his window to try and get a better look at the person as they came closer to the tower.

They had dark hair that only went to their shoulders, but Draco was pretty sure that they were a boy, because they looked nothing like his mother. It was difficult to see any other features between the tree branches, but perched on the boy's nose were round spectacles that helped people see better, like the ones Draco had read about in books.

It was all very well for Draco to look at the boy while he was still in the Forest, but as soon as he cleared the trees Draco ducked behind one of his shutters, afraid of being seen. Draco could hear the boy as he wandered about the clearing around the tower, the bridle on his hippogriff jangling loudly. After it was quiet for a minute, Draco thought that the boy had left, and then he was rather sad that he hadn't been brave enough to poke his head out and say hello –

"Anybody up there?"

Draco felt a spike of excitement. The boy had not gone away! All Draco had to do was take two small steps, and then the boy would see him, and then… well, Draco had absolutely no idea how to go about making friends, but he was sure it wasn't hard.

He closed his eyes and took a deep breath and took those two steps.

Nothing happened.

Draco slowly opened his eyes and looked down, only to see that the boy was not looking back up at him but was stroking his hippogriff as it napped in the grass. Draco relaxed a little bit. Now he could see that the boy had a defined, square jaw, full lips, and bright green eyes behind his spectacles – wait.

"Hello!" the boy shouted with a grin, and Draco froze. "Lovely day, isn't it?"

The boy continued smiling innocently, and Draco couldn't take it. He grabbed the shutters, slammed them shut, and then leaned back against them, breathing hard. Ophis, who had been contentedly sunbathing, lifted his head in annoyance at the loss of warmth.

"There's a boy down there, Ophis!" Draco told him. "And – and he's pretty!"

Draco's mother said that snakes only understood people who spoke Parseltongue, but Draco was almost certain Ophis understood him most of the time. Right now, however, it didn't seem like Ophis comprehended a single word, because he slithered off with a flick of his tail, probably to find another patch of sun somewhere.

Draco didn't dare open the window again until the sun had almost completely set, and when he did, he was just a teensy bit disappointed that the boy wasn't still down there.

It was probably for the best, anyway, Draco thought as he went to bed later that night. It would have been fun to have a friend, but he had a feeling his mother wouldn't have liked it one bit.

"Oh, Draco, dear!"

Draco muffled his groan in his pillow as he awoke. His mother only called him dear when she was in a particularly good mood. It was at least better than when she was in a bad mood and went into one of her rages.

"Draco!"

She'd dropped the endearment, so Draco knew he had to get out of bed now. He scrambled out from under his covers, quickly located the end of his hair, ran to the window, and tossed it down to his mother so that she could climb up it. His mother had set up many wards to protect Draco, so the only way in the tower was by climbing up his hair. It seemed like it took forever for his mother to reach the window, although it was probably only a minute.

"Draco, I have wonderful news!"

Draco surreptitiously tried to massage the back of his head and neck as he pasted on a smile for his mother.

"Really? What is it?"

"The Dark Lord has agreed to marry me!" his mother squealed. Actually squealed.

"That is wonderful, Mother," Draco said with false cheer.

He had absolutely no idea how he felt about this development. His mother had always told him stories about the Dark Lord, and how he was ruthlessly cut down by the Light shortly after Draco was born. Draco had listened with great interest when he was younger, but as he got older, he found he didn't really care about stories of a dead man and his ideologies about a perfect society.

Well, as of about a year ago, the Dark Lord wasn't so dead after all, and Draco had underestimated how obsessed his mother was with him, because every week when she visited, he was nearly all she wanted to talk about. It was almost a relief to hear that the Dark Lord was going to marry her, because maybe now she'd start talking about something else.

"He'll be such an excellent father to you, Draco!"

"What?"

As it turned out, Draco had some very strong feelings about people he didn't know becoming his father all of a sudden.

"Draco, darling, I know you'll love him as much as I do!" Draco had some doubts about that.

"He'll be the best father you've ever had!" Seeing as Draco had never known another father, it wasn't a very high bar.

"I'll bring him with me next week — you'll see!" His mother promised him — or perhaps threatened, that was still to be determined — as she left later that evening.

His mother's announcement left Draco unable to concentrate on any of his usual distractions. None of his books could hold his attention, he could only poke listlessly at his piano keys, and when he practiced his spells none of them had nearly as much precision as usual. Draco finally gave up at trying to do anything productive with his evening and crawled into bed, falling into a fitful sleep.

"Good morning!" The boy said cheerfully, perched on a broomstick in midair just outside his window.

Draco stared at him in half-asleep confusion. Was he dreaming? It was a nice dream. The pretty boy was back. Draco hummed contentedly and lifted his tea to take a sip.

"Ah!" It had burnt him. Draco glared at his mug while pulling out his wand and casting a Cooling Charm. He went to take another sip, and then froze with his mug halfway to his lips, suddenly realizing that he was not actually dreaming. He slowly looked back up, and the boy was still sitting there, watching Draco in clear amusement.

"You alright?"

"Er, yes," Draco said, finding his words after only a brief, awkward pause.

"Good," said the boy. "My name's Harry. Harry Potter."

"Mine's Draco," Draco said, and then, before he lost his nerve, quickly blurted: "Will you be my friend… Harry?"

Harry's green eyes looked startled for a moment, but then he smiled.

"Of course I will."

Draco thought Harry was absolutely fascinating. Perhaps it was because he'd only ever talked to his mother, but he simply loved listening to Harry tell him about all the places beyond Draco's tower that he'd been, even though Harry was a terrible storyteller and frequently had to backtrack in the middle of his stories.

Harry had gone to Hogwarts, and made all sorts of friends, and had all sorts of adventures and seen all sorts of fantastic things that Draco had only ever read about in the books that his mother owl ordered for him.

Harry asked Draco questions about himself, too, but Draco found it far more interesting to hear about Harry, so he mostly deflected those questions and turned the conversation back around. Harry visited him every day and stayed for hours, and Draco enjoyed his visits so much that on the sixth day, he almost forgot to warn Harry.

"Wait!" Draco cried out, just before Harry tilted his broomstick away from the tower. "Don't come tomorrow, my mother's visiting."

A cloud passed over Harry's expression. "Actually, I think I'd like to meet her."

"No, no!" Draco insisted. "Really, she's bringing her fiance, and I haven't even met him yet!"

For a moment, Draco thought that Harry was going to insist on showing up, but he eventually nodded, and as Harry flew off, Draco wondered at how much he was going to miss not seeing him, if only for one day.

Draco was incredibly nervous for his mother's visit. He woke up ridiculously early, and set about cleaning the tower even though it was hardly messy in the first place. That hardly took him more than an hour, so then he settled on rebraiding his hair, which was a big enough task that it took his mind off of who was visiting.

It worked so well that he was startled when he heard his mother's voice from outside his tower. Draco tossed his hair down without looking, feeling more and more anxious by the second.

The strain on his head with two people climbing up his hair was incredible; Draco started getting a headache before they were even halfway up.

"Draco, darling," said his mother when she finally climbed over the windowsill, "this is the Dark Lord!"

The Dark Lord looked a bit ungainly clambering into the tower, Draco thought sourly, but he did his best to smile through his stabbing headache and greet the man properly.

"Pleased to meet you, my Lord," Draco said, with a short bow that only aggravated his throbbing head.

"So, this is Draco Mal—"

"My Lord!" Draco's mother cut him off, and Draco was a bit surprised at her audacity. So was the Dark Lord, if the look he directed at her was anything to go by.

"Draco's surname is Black," his mother said, with an odd inflection that made Draco instantly suspicious. What had the Dark Lord been about to say?

"I see," the Dark Lord nodded, and then turned his attention back to Draco. "Draco, I will soon become something of a father figure to you."

Draco tried not to shiver beneath the Dark Lord's full gaze. He hadn't asked a question, but Draco was sure he was supposed to say something.

"I — I look forward to it, my Lord."

The Dark Lord just looked at him for several long seconds, and Draco dropped his eyes, not wanting to seem belligerent. At that moment, Ophis slithered out from beneath a pile of Draco's hair and began to wind his way up and around Draco's leg, providing a gentle, comforting pressure.

"Ah, now who is this?" asked the Dark Lord, and Draco was a little afraid of the look in his eyes.

"Ophis," Draco told him, but the Dark Lord had started making some very strange hissing noises and didn't appear to hear him. Draco was confused until Ophis began making similar sounds, too, and then he realized that the Dark Lord must be speaking Parseltongue. Somehow that made Draco even more afraid than before, but, as if he sensed Draco's ratcheting fear, Ophis gently butted his head against Draco's fingers, and he instantly felt better.

"Interesting," the Dark Lord said, in English at last. "A very loyal pet you have there, my boy."

Draco did his best to conceal the shudder that coursed through him with another half-bow. "Thank you, my Lord."

"I think," the Dark Lord said, addressing his mother, "that Draco ought to participate in the little ceremony we are having next week."

"Oh, my Lord!" Draco almost wrinkled his nose at how — how simpering his mother's voice became. "Yes!"

"Then, Draco," the Dark Lord said to him, "you will receive my Mark, and be truly mine."

Draco's mouth went abruptly dry, and his tongue felt heavy. Grounding himself on the pressure he felt from Ophis around his leg, it was all he could do to respond, faintly, "Thank you, my Lord."

The Dark Lord appeared to be pleased by this, and Draco was relieved when both him and his mother did not stay much longer after that. They climbed down his hair again, and as soon as he was sure they were gone Draco collapsed on his sofa and cried. He didn't want a father, especially not the Dark Lord, who was cold and sharp and ugly, and wanted to put a Mark on him.

But there was no way out of it, at least not that Draco could think of. He was at their mercy, trapped in his tower with no one to—

"Draco?"

It was Harry, hovering outside his window on his broomstick. Draco tried to stop his sobs, but he only succeeded at slowing them a little.

"What's wrong, Draco?" Harry asked again. "Can I come in?"

Harry had never asked to come inside the tower before. Draco had never offered, either, because he was afraid of leaving evidence for his mother to find. It did sound nice, but if Harry wanted to come in, he'd have to climb up Draco's hair, and Draco didn't think he could take one more person pulling and tugging and yanking on it. But Draco didn't think he could stand it if he were alone in his tower for one more minute.

He looked up at Harry, struggling through his headache and his tears, and asked, "Take me away?"

It was almost as much a shock to Draco as it was to Harry. He'd intended to ask if Harry would climb up his hair and sit with him — perhaps even give him a hug! The migraine would've been worth it. But instead… dear Merlin, what had Draco said!?

Draco opened his mouth, ready to take it back, but Harry suddenly smiled and drove that thought out of his head.

"I'd like nothing better."

"You'd — really?"

"Yeah, c'mon," Harry said, and patted behind him on his broomstick. "We can go anywhere you want."

Draco had wished to go so many places outside his tower, he wouldn't have known which one to pick first. Just to go anywhere beyond the tower had seemed like a distant dream up until a minute ago.

But he did know where he needed to start.

Slowly, he approached his window, growing more uncertain with every step. Would he even be able to leave? There were spells on spells preventing people getting in, were there ones to stop him getting out, too?

Harry was holding out his hand outstretched to Draco, smiling eagerly.

There was only one way to find out, Draco told himself. He took Harry's hand, a deep breath, and quickly stepped up on the sill and onto the back of the broom in one quick motion.

Draco felt almost giddy with success. He'd done it. He'd left his tower. Harry would take him anywhere; he could go see the ocean, meet magical beasts and beings, even go to Hogwarts, if he wanted! The entire world was somewhere out there beyond the trees, just waiting for him.

"You ready?" Harry was looking back at him, head turned awkwardly.

Draco grinned, headache and tears forgotten.

"Yes."